Yo-Yo Ma
Yo-Yo Ma
Yo-Yo Mais a Chinese-American cellist. Born in Paris, he spent his schooling years in New York City and was a child prodigy, performing from the age of five. He graduated from the Juilliard School and Harvard University and has enjoyed a prolific career as both a soloist performing with orchestras around the world and a recording artist. His 90+ albums have received 18 Grammy Awards...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCellist
Date of Birth7 October 1955
CityParis, France
CountryUnited States of America
It took me way beyond what I knew, into places of which I was totally scared, but as I became less frightened, I welcomed new ways of thinking and approaching something. It made me an infinitely richer person, and I think a better musician.
I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
Children, in a way, are constant learners. Certainly sponge-like. Absorbing everything without careful analysis, even though, at the same time, they are certainly capable of incredible insights.
Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.
One is that you have to take time, lots of time, to let an idea grow from within. The second is that when you sign on to something, there will be issues of trust, deep trust, the way the members of a string quartet have to trust one another.
Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.
Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
I'm not likely to forget where I've been and what I've done and learned. I think it's just as important to play new instruments as to play new pieces. The old ones are getting scarcer and the new ones more and more wonderful.
A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.
You know, you can have someone who's the very best at something, but if there's not that kind of chemistry, collaborating is not going to amount to anything.
Mastering music is more than learning technical skills. Practicing is about quality, not quantity. Some days I practice for hours; other days it will be just a few minutes.
My job as a performer is to make sure that whatever happens in a performance lives in somebody else, that it's memorable... If you forget tomorrow what you heard yesterday, there's really not much point in you having been there - or me, for that matter.
I think all musicians have at one time or another experienced one physical problem or another. I have had tendinitis a couple of times, so I try to be really careful. It takes patience and persistence to overcome injury.